Member-only story
Reflections
First Line Fiction Prompt# 23
His reflection smiled at him, but he hadn’t moved a muscle. Calvin Hodge sat on top of the three-quarter submerged boulder in the still water of the crystalline alpine pool, staring at the face looking back at him. “What are you smiling at, you old fart? The climb down here almost killed you!”
Although he’d been coming to the narrow cut in the river, pinched between the opposing enormous granite crescents crowned with spires of lodgepole and tamarack pines for years, he suddenly felt lost. He wondered if this trip would be his last to the watery hold.
When home wasn’t a refuge, this small piece of wilderness was, and much like reaching his front door, he arrived at this place consumed with the same thought: “Do I still have the last thread of my heart?”
The prize Western Slope Cutthroat trout he’d affectionately named Frank the Tank” made his home beneath the undercut of the ancient rock that split eons ago from the glaciers cutting the valley floor. Upstream, the water ran wide and flat, tumbling over pebbled shoals in playful gurgle before the channel narrowed and the river’s voice rose to a roar. A whitewater ribbon churned and frothed, feeding into the gorge before washing out again, broad, emerald and serene.